In various database querying environments, dimensions may arise that have a cardinality at or near the cardinality of the fact data. For instance, in a business database, the dimension attribute “order number” would likely have a unique order number for every order stored in the database. This is in contrast to other dimension attributes such as, for instance, the “region” of the store in which the order took place. The region would be limited to a much smaller cardinality, such as five regions for the entire United States (e.g., Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, South, and West). Where there are 100 million orders, the order number dimension will have a cardinality of 100 million, whereas the region dimension will have a cardinality of five. Unfortunately, the existence of high-cardinality attributes causes various problems when multidimensional data cubes are built from the database because traditional dimension data structures become overly burdened by a high-cardinality dimension.